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Tuesday, December 9, 2008

Tuesday, December 9, 2008

I've been getting requests for more "missed marks" Wrecks. Your wish = my command.Well, when it's something I was going to do anyway, that is.

Here's what Jennifer S. wanted for her sister-in-law's baby shower:

So you know this is going to be good, right? [snicker] Here's how I imagine the conversation in the bakery went:

"So Lee, you gonna need a tracing for that cake design?"[scoffing] "Puh-lease! Me? Don't you remember how I took that art class in night school last fall? I'm golden! Pass me the airbrush, will ya?""Wow, are you sure? It looks pretty complicated...""Only to the untrained eye, my friend. Now stand back and let the master work."

15 minutes later:[staring]"Gosh, Lee, I don't know...""Yeah, it's a little bare in the corners, huh? I better add some roses. Let's see, what color goes best with purple, orange, and yellow?""Maybe a light pur..."[interrupting] "OH! I know: teal!"

(Note: The crazy names and question marks were actually requested, since the baby's name was still undisclosed. I'm guessing the damaged area was a result of Jennifer doing a face-plant after fainting in disgust at the sight of it. Am I right, Jen?)

Is it just me, or is that cake design out of focus? But then, I have the same problem with my high definition TV... without hi-def eyes, what's the point?

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Based on how fuzzy the design looks, my guess is that the 'oops' on the bottom was done by the decorator trying to get in close to do the detail work on those teal roses. When you see the original, you just KNEW a wreck was on the way. The mind reels at the possibilities. Would Dr. Seuss find it amusing or insulting?

oh my wow ummm. Yeah Im sure somewhere those colors really go together and Im sure if you squint really hard and tilt your head to the left ok well maybe the right. hmmm I think I can kind of see the resemblance to the picture.

That's pretty Wreck-tastic! Although, part of me wonders if the people ordering complicated cakes like this from a grocery store bakery aren't setting themselves up for a Wreck-tastrophe. Walmart bakery does not equal Mike's Amazing Cakes.

I had a similar experience 7 years ago (way pre-CW) and had a family friend copy a picture of bears on clouds. It was no way close and I promptly hauled to my nearest grocer for a replacement. Gosh, now I wish I took a picture of it!

Aw, c'mon, if you're not paying a gazillion dollars for a professional baker, you have no business requesting such a complicated design.

And, on the other hand, if you're not a professional baker who can command a gazillion dollars with your artistry & skill, you have no business accepting such an assignment. This decorator doesn't even have the ability to write levelly. What a waste of frosting.

Holy hell..that is pretty awful! I, for one, would not have taken that order. I wonder if the bakery purchased thee rights to reproduce a copyrighted image..oh well, never mind..that doesn't even come close to a reproduction of a licensed image...Oh, come on you decorators!! You need to know when to say "NO we can't do that!!"

word verification.first time...eggrumpthey deserve a thrown egg-to-the-rump for that monstrosity!

Lovely. My favorite thing about this cake has got to be the baby-alien's eyes and smile. (It looks like it's actually made by stray spatters from the purple alien airship.) Anyone else see this?

I think the baby-alien is looking to the left at its alien space-monitor (that orange square that's meant to be *choke* a flower), and smiling to itself over its evil plan.

New reader... I just found this blog the other day. I've already read the entire thing, though. Snarking, or reading someone else snarking (not to mention seeing other people FAIL so badly), really relieves stress.

Missed Marks may be my favorite category! Is it just me, or by not leaving some white space for the baby's diaper... have we all witnessed the first naked-babyblob/purple-snail flight? No amount of blue flowers and poor penmanship can detract from this historic occasion. This looks like a job for an edible image-transfer.

I guess I'm the only one who thinks the designer did a rather decent job with it, for being by hand. A printing would have made more sense/looked the best, but it's a good attempt at a complicated drawing.

"Has the cake decorator never heard of the edible rice paper??? Print the picture on the rice paper and stick it on the cake."Beth - I couldn't agree with you more. I have a feeling that is what the customer expected them to do. You see it in grocery stores all the time.

Why would the bakery agree to copy this design in the first place? Its one thing to request black and white kittens or a baby with balloons, but to ask for an exact Dr. Seuss image if they don't don't have a license right for it...well who knows what you're going to get. There's a reason for those books of screen prints at Dairy Queen and plastic bits that you can order from Deco Pak. People own those images and you pay a fee to use them.

Or maybe that's why its a blurry after image, but the bakery should have explained that's what they would do if that's all the closer they would do...

Someone else said it...legally you can't put a copyrighted image on a cake and sell it. THese bakers would be better off refusing to do it for legal reasons rather than their inablility to reproduce the image effictively. Sooooooo....what's the best thing for a baker to do? Either refuse the order....or do something unrecognizable and when the people who ordered it come to pick it up, give them a big wink.

I personally think that the cake requester, being a fan of this blog, asked Walmart to make something complicated on purpose, just to get a wreck to send in. I just don't think she ever expected this level of wreckiness.

By the way, I just know they went with FritzPatrick. I can just feel it in my bones.

Okay, all other wreckiness aside, I really hope they didn't pick Renton as a name. Really. What better start in life than to be named after a fictional Scottish junkie with a penchant for toilet-diving?

For all those who think the design is too complicated....edible images is a pretty simple process. They can churn those suckers out to look like anything or anybody...they do photos of people all the time. All they need is for the original to be in soft copy. And if the baker really needed to frost it or whatever, they could have just traced the edible image.

So that is just a horrible, out of focus, wrecktastic design that we can now all use to brighten our day :)

I see a chess piece on a devil ray fish chained to birds. What kind of fiendish torture is this??? Are the birds under water, or is the fish in the air? And what does the pawn have to do with anything??? If I'm reading this cake right, the poor child is going to be used heedlessly by parents who had no right to breed in the first place!

I see people saying she was asking for a wreck by asking for a complicated design. I say, the baker's shouldn't except a design they know they can't handle. They're be less wrecks if people would just admit that they have no idea what they're doing when it comes to cakes. sure, life would be less boring that way but they're also be fewer frustrated costumers.

OK, is it just me, or do those names sound more like LAST names than FIRST? I mean, if the baby's last name (thus and therefore, baby's DADDY) is as-of-yet undisclosed, perhaps next time they should look for a cake wreck/ paternity test package deal. In mean, come on, Walmart's gotta have something like that, right? *snicker*

OK, after this, the Mowhawk carrot-riding babies starts to look good. At least you could tell what everything was!!! Wrecks like this make some previous wrecks not seem so bad. Still funny, of course, but maybe not as bad as we first thought. OH, NO!!!!! New category needed, When Wrecks Go Right.....

I was rather charmed with the idea of telling the child, when it came time for the famous birds and bees talk, "Yes, the purple snail brought you...you're too special for a stork." But then I noticed that the snail is actually hauling a (gasp)giant baby bottle nipple. There's no baby there at all. Yikes. word verification is copul.

For those commenting that the design is too complex, a friend of mine has had cakes for her birthday that recreated a) the battle of Thermopylae (sp?), b) scenes from anime, and c) a famous portrait of Mme. de Pompadour. The bakers did it by making an edible print for the cake top, which is what these bakers should have done.

Re. the image being copyrighted, I think it would only be a problem if the bakery were illegally using a copyrighted image as a regular design. I could be mistaken, but I think a single commission, not for resale but for a private party, would be considered fair use.

Word verification: luoutonc. Lunatic or luau tonic? Take your pick; either is appropriate.

Re. the image being copyrighted, I think it would only be a problem if the bakery were illegally using a copyrighted image as a regular design.

Not to beat a nearly dead horse, but once they accept money for it, it's illegal whether they make it once or a hundred times. I worked for a large copy store chain that got sued for copyright violation - so I learned more than I ever want to know about that kind of thing :)

I agree that it's a very complicated design; but I seem to remember watching Food Network and nowadays they have fancy edible icing sheets, upon which can be printed (with edible ink) any manner of neat designs. With that technology this design would have been a cakewalk (snicker--I couldn't help myself!).

An upscale cake place would have been able to do this...WalMart or Kroger, not so much. I would never have asked a supermarket place to do this--it makes me wonder what kind of bakery was asked to reproduce the design in question.

Ok, yes, it is a "complicated" design. But it isn't SO complicated that ALL the dimensions are off, the colours wonky and the flying creatures (can't call them birds) look like they're involved in some bondage game. Uncool.

HOLY HOLES IN A DONUT BATMAN! I just saw a flyin turd steal our bat saucer...

Having worked in several bakeries over the years I must say there are other methods of making a viable copy of that picture. One is an projector. Even the DQ I decorated cakes at had one. They didnt need to copy it perfectly but a simple line drawing over the smudgy airbrush would have worked just fine. I am totally offended at the HORRID printing. If you dont have nice handwriting leave the print work for someone that does.

As soon as I saw the design I said, "Uh oh!" I recently painted a bunch of Dr. Seuss characters on my childrens' bedroom walls ...(photos are buried on my blog http://subrosa-rosamundi.blogspot.com/2008_10_01_archive.htmlif you wanna see them....scroll to the bottom ) and THAT was a huge undertaking. To ask it of a cheap cake decorator would be asking a LOT!But I honestly expected a better attempt. It looks like this cake decorator threw in the towel after 5 minutes.

I just had a Seuss/ Oh, Baby, The Places You'll Go-themed shower. I also did not have a name chosen at the time of the shower, either! I am so sad at this point that my hostesses did not request THAT cake.

It looks like the little msn messenger guy got eaten by a snail. The the evil msn little guy eating snail had his flying bird thingys, (Fritzpatrick, McTovish and Brenton), from the movie Heavy Metal, carry him away to his lair in the rafters of Mount Doom.

wvotd is geollm..."the sun, shinig through the shell of the snail revealed a silohuette of the noshed msn guy trapped in the snails stomach. This is known as the geollm effect."

or it's Middle Earth gel insoles. "I'm geollm like gollum."

Or they were using up the last of the teal icing from the Bules Cleuless cake. Nice recycling bakerpeoples.

I agree that the bakery never should've accepted this design because of the complexity and copyright issues. I also agree that you're asking for trouble asking a standard grocery store bakery (which is where I assume she took it) to do a design like this.

I love it! I'm looking at CakeWrecks while my 4 year old son is eating breakfast with me (I know, there goes the mom of the year award for me). My son immediately said, "Mom, that cake looks wierd- is that right?" Ha!!!!

This may have been a design picked out from the decorator book... so maybe we should all stop commenting about the copyright thing.

Jen just said that was what they wanted and gee.. if it's in the darn book, you'd think someone would be skilled enough to make it.

As far as names... hmm... I think it's cute... as far as joking and that's what they were calling it. My cousin and his wife were calling their last child, Vladimir Nickel Iputin... they re not russian... name has absolutely nothing to do with their son... just drove his mom - my aunt- crazy for 7 months. ;o) I could see them putting that on their cake. lol

(Renton is a city near the Seattle airport... perhaps there was a hotel stay on a cancelled flight?)

What is the worst thing of all, to me, is that this cake could be salvageable with a few more steps. Using the airbrush for basic color and shape and then going in with darker icing to create the outlines and detail.

Instead, it just looks like the baker got tired half way through and figured that teal roses would make up for the complete lack of effort they put into the rest.

Poor Theodore Geisel,spinning in his graveAs this baker turned knavebotched his characterbeyond any recognition of Mr Richterand his shaky scale. Oh such attempts that pale!That we must be made to seesuch baked debauchery!

The people that keep saying "it's such a complicated design" are morons. Have you never ordered a cak before? Most professional bakeries have the picture scanned onto edible paper/ink and place it on the cake. That's how you get photo cakes with the person's picture on it too. DUH. When the person went into the bakery and handed them this picture, obviously they expected that result. Who would purposely get a wreck for their sister's baby shower? How embarrassing!

Also, I highly doubt a guest at the baby shower would turn them in for using a copyrighted image... Everything seems to be some legal issue these days- it's a baby shower cake that will be EATEN, for god's sake! It's not like they are making a billboard or something...

My local supermarket bakers don't know what devil's food cake is. No, seriously--I asked for a devil's food sheet cake and got a blank stare. I tried to explain what it was and got another blank stare. All this about 50 feet away from the aisle that sold devil's food cake mix.

I would never ever ask for something this complicated from a supermarket bakery. You're just asking for grief.

I have a theory on the names: I think the actual name choices were Tavish and Patrick, and the shower hostess decided they were *so* Irish they must have a Mc or Fitz (or Fritz as the case may be) in front of them. I bet that under the smoosh was an O' or something (O'Renton).Also, did nobody else notice that the poor snail is *bleeding*?? Oh the humanity.

Hmmmmm....is it the Marlin or the Swordfish that looks like a stork?IF storks were purple.No matter.But wait! Why is the Marlin /Swordfish trying to catch chickens on the wing? Maybe it's a graphic for a new carnival ride, hence the bubble thingie bearing a little (uneasy) rider.Ya THINK?Now, about those NAMES...my heart says, "No!!" --but my mind is saying, "That'll be left up to the results of the multiple paternity tests..."

I am honored at all the attention my submission received. The baby's name is Nolan Matthew. It was not a Walmart bakery but an EAL (English as Another Language) bakery in Federal Way, Wa. I've taken Wilton Courses I-III and could have done a better job if I wasn't planning the rest of the shower. Thank you all for your hilarious comments.

I'm father in law of the mother. The cake was pre-paid at $59 for a quarter sheet. The bakery assured us it was no problem. The names were a joke take on a Dr. seuss theme. I picked it up the day of the shower. What could I do at that point?

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